


This Was a Triumph. I'm Making a Note Here: "Huge Success"

by cabbageboy



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: F/F, Falling In Love, Fluff, Gay Robots, Light Angst, Love, Mild Blood, Portal References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-12
Updated: 2020-11-12
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:48:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27520273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cabbageboy/pseuds/cabbageboy
Summary: Adora wakes from stasis and begins her new job as a test subject, destined to test the portal gun "for the rest of her life," however long that may be.She joins a stranger in an attempt to escape Aperture Science's testing facility but along the way they meet an unlikely friend who just misses her robot girlfriend.Sometimes you don't belong in your timeline. Sometimes you belong in the future.*Edited, read the beginning note before continuing
Relationships: Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Light Hope/Mara (She-Ra)
Comments: 6
Kudos: 64





	This Was a Triumph. I'm Making a Note Here: "Huge Success"

**Author's Note:**

> Oops I did that thing again where I wrote some really long oneshot that I am not sure anyone will like, just because I wanted it to exist
> 
> EDIT FOR CW  
> ***There are 2 lines that are references to the times in Portal 2 when GLaDOS makes fun of Chell's weight and I didn't realize until now that that is probably really triggering for some people so I isolated the sentence from the paragraph that it is a part of and put 3 asterisks before and after each line.
> 
> ex:  
> ***  
> line  
> ***
> 
> I'm really sorry to anyone who was affected by that while reading because I should have said that when I posted it

Adora exits the elevator and takes a deep breath, steadying herself. She doesn’t know what lies ahead of her, beyond the cold metal door in the eerie silence. She is alone, she knows she is, but she still can’t help but wonder what it's like out there, beyond the testing facility. All she has known since she awoke in her dingy room, peeling wallpaper and shattered glass, was the never ending experiments.

The testing

The chambers were completely sealed off, with vents to pump in air and companion cubes. There were no windows, though she suspected that the reason why lied in the fact that they were underground, miles underground, and windows wouldn’t have helped anyway. All she had seen of the place were the elevators, the tiny corridors into the testing chambers, and the chambers themselves. Even if she found something of use in the chambers, something that would help her escape, she couldn’t bring it with her. The energy fields fixed to the chamber’s exits virtually vaporized any foreign object she tried to smuggle out. All that was allowed in, or out, of the testing chambers was herself, the clothes on her back, and the prototype portal gun she was destined to help test. 

The puzzles themselves weren’t that bad and were actually kind of fun, at first. It started as a few easy ones, with a portal in a fixed location so she only needed to figure out the placement of one to get to the exit. Then she got control of the dual portals, and was responsible for figuring out where to place two, and while those were a little more difficult it still wasn’t the hardest thing. The addition of the deadly turrets was scary, but grew to only be frustrating as she got to more difficult chambers. They could kill her easily, as could the moats of vomit colored acid, but as long as she took her time and acted carefully they wouldn’t harm her. After all, there was a way to get through to the exit without dying, or else it would be a pretty poorly designed course. If nothing else, Light Hope was proud of her courses. 

***

The jokes about her weight and intelligence were a little much sometimes. 

***

The jokes were brutal, but some of them made her laugh a little, too. The robot might have been out to kill her, but at least she had a personality. 

As she got further and further along the tract, through chamber after chamber, solving puzzle after puzzle, something started to feel more and more off. The chambers themselves were immaculate, beautifully designed with clean white walls, each panel perfectly placed. However, every once in a while she would feel like there were eyes staring at her from behind the walls. She knew it wasn’t possible, that there was no one else there to interfere with her testing, but she couldn’t help but feel as though she was being watched by someone other than the omnipotent AI that studied and judged her every move. 

She is feeling dizzy from the previous chamber, being launched into the air by pressure plates and having to place portals mid jump was messing with her senses, not to mention the fact that she has no idea how long she has been testing. She isn’t allowed to rest, her best bet at getting a moment to think is to walk a little slower than normal outside of the testing chambers where there are no security cameras and Light Hope can’t see her.

Besides the omnipotent AI that is bitter about every success and takes pleasure in all of her failures, the deadly turrets, vats of brown-green toxic goop, and the overall feeling of dread she gets from how secure it all feels, another concern overtakes her. Before each testing chamber is a sign that flickers to life in front of her, clearly asleep after who knows how long of not being seen by another person, that says the number testing chamber she is in. The concerning part is that this number appears as a fraction. She is currently in testing chamber 19/22, meaning that something happens when she completes 22 chambers. She doesn’t know what happens after 22 chambers, whether something happens at all or that number is just part of the test and resets to 0. She dreads completing chamber number 22, no matter what. The idea of an end, when it was very clear that she was going to be testing for the rest of her life, was not comforting. She thought she was in for 50 or 60 years of exhausting, torturous testing. She hadn’t taken into account until much later that “the rest of her life” could be seconds, depending on what this place decided to throw at her next. As she got closer and closer to test chamber number 22, she felt as though “the rest of her life” was a finite amount of time, dwindling quickly as she moved closer and closer to the end.

Upon entering this chamber she can tell that something is off, like, really off. It takes her a few minutes to figure out why. She tries not to react or look too hard at the scratches, bloodied nail marks etched into the walls, or the panel that seems to be pulled out at a corner. Giving attention to it would make Light Hope notice, and there would go her only connection to another living person in this place. She goes about her task with as much thought and precision as usual, completing the test chamber quickly with minimal faults, something that seems to disappoint Light Hope which, again, isn’t comforting. She can’t stop thinking about the nail marks, the blood, the sign that she wasn’t completely alone as she had been led to believe. Yet, how was she supposed to investigate? How was she supposed to figure out what it meant when she was being watched every moment that she was in the test chambers?

Her answer came in the form of test chamber 21/22. She walked in and instead of being greeted by Light Hope’s voice there was silence. She took a moment to look around and while the chamber appeared normal, there was one glaring difference to the rest of them. The security cameras’ taunting red LEDs weren’t lit. She wasn’t being recorded. An abrupt metallic screech caught her attention as she spotted a panel, the second one up on the wall, being shoved out on a long cylindrical arm, revealing the space beyond. All she saw from the darkness within was a pair of eyes, one gold and one cyan. 

A voice broke her from her shocked silence.

“Well? You coming princess?”

A hand reached down expectantly and the voice, though teasing, had a sense of urgency. She looked once more at the exit to the chamber, the one she was supposed to unlock, and then back at the hand.

What would happen to her if she continued testing?

What would happen to her if she didn’t?

Pulling the strap of the portal gun over a shoulder to fasten it to her back and free her hands, she took a running start and leapt up, bracing a foot on the wall and grabbing the outstretched hand. With a combination of their strength and her momentum the stranger pulled her behind the panel and into the unknown. 

The woman reached out and yanked the panel back into place, slamming it closed in an effort to make that particular panel indistinguishable from the rest of the wall to avoid any indication that there was anything to hide. Adora took a second to look around, eyes adjusting to the darkness, the only source of light a red glow of emergency lights in what was clearly a service corridor and the steely blue emitting softly from the end of the portal gun. While the parts of the building she had been allowed in before were a marvel of technology, polished and futuristic, the space just beyond what she was supposed to see appeared much older, decades out of date. Granted, she hadn’t seen a single calendar since she awoke from stasis, so the words “futuristic” and “decades old” didn’t hold much value. She clearly was never supposed to see the steel grating, rusted pipes, and fractured concrete stained a moldy green that lie just beyond the testing facility, the building’s user interface as she had come to think of it. 

The whole place sounded like a factory, or more appropriately, a disjoined conglomeration of machines, only some of which functioned properly and the rest left there and built around instead of being removed or repaired. Loud metallic pings ricocheted off of the flat walls and caused a disorienting echo as the two moved wordlessly, footsteps fitting seamlessly in with the rattle of bolts barely holding cylinders together while pistons hammered in and out of them. Adora’s suspicions of being underground were confirmed as they climbed up, walking along catwalks and running up stairs to put as much distance between them and the testing chamber as possible. When they inevitably came across a section of the metal grating that fell away to the abyss below they were able to use the portal gun to their advantage. Occasionally there were no walls to affix a portal, so they would boost each other up and drag themselves level after level upward until they arrived at a section that appeared sturdy enough to hold their weights.

Adora knew the facility had to be big, but its size was monumental, far larger than she could have ever imagined. It was as though each catwalk floated in space, suspended somewhere that had no earth and no sky. If she hadn’t had gravity to weigh her down and remind her which way was up she would have been completely lost. The foggy nothingness that stretched on in all directions did nothing to settle her nerves. The woman in front of her seemed to know where she was going, but she was probably just as lost in this maze as Adora was.

Adora was getting dizzy from how tired and hungry she was, but the other woman probably wasn’t faring much better if her decreased pace was anything to go by, though she might have just slowed down for Adora’s sake.

She isn’t sure how much distance they have covered when they reach what the other woman had evidently been looking for. Adora sighed with relief when she noticed that it wasn’t one of the circular automatic doors that she knew were controlled by Light Hope. It was an honest to god, regular fucking door. It was rectangular. It had hinges. It even had a doorknob. She felt like she could cry at the sudden familiarity of it. 

The knob twisted with ease and they entered what appeared to be an old classroom. The scuffed linoleum floor was speckled with pools of brown water from the burst pipes above, a rhythmic dripping echoing in the silence. A few light fixtures flickered from where they hung unevenly from the dilapidated ceiling, but most of them dangled from fraying cables with shattered bulbs. A blackboard with a film of chalk residue hung on the wall opposite the door, rows of wooden desks splintering from dry rot and toppled over, filled the space between. There were lockers, rusted with doors in various states of distress, open in the corner next to a wall of shattered windows to the hallway beyond. Adora bent down to pick up one of the papers scattered across the floor but the writing was faded and the sheets were covered in dirt and debris. They were obviously in one of the older parts of the facility, from when all of this started and there were actually people running this place.

“Here,” a voice spoke softly behind her. She turned around and saw the other woman holding out a grey wrapped foil packet and a bottle of water. She took them both and ate as she studied her rescuer.

She was shorter than Adora, with chocolate hair that was pulled up in a ponytail, bangs framing her face and sweeping gently over an eye. Her jumpsuit, the standard issue one, had been cut at the mid section with an ethernet cable tied around her waist holding up the part that now served as a pair of pants. The top half of the jumpsuit as well as the white undershirt were cropped to show off her toned abs. The sleeves of the orange top were rolled up to cling to her clearly defined biceps. 

It is at this moment that two thoughts hit Adora. One being that this woman was fucking hot. The other is that she suddenly remembers how gay she has been this whole time. Maybe that’s why the feminine robot voice insulting her didn’t bother her that much. That would be a lot to unpack later, if she made it out of here. 

Maybe waking up from stasis and being thrust directly into a dangerous environment was a good enough reason to momentarily forget you’re gay as hell, especially when there are no people in sight. Then again, she should have remembered before then considering her thoughts when she was instructed to drop the companion cube into the incinerator was, “yes, incinerate me mommy.”

Adora finished off her bar and water bottle, looking around for a trash can before rolling her eyes and dropping the trash to the floor.

“Name’s Adora. Um, thanks for, getting me out of there,” Adora starts, not really sure how to go about thanking her. It's hard to thank someone when you know they saved you, but you don’t know what they saved you from. 

“I’m Catra. And you’re welcome. I’ve been watching you for a while, you lasted longer than the rest that I’ve seen. I wanted to save them too but….well they’d always die before they got to a chamber it was safe for me to break into,” She whispers, casting her eyes to the ground.

“Damn thats…. Fuck I’m so sorry. The shit you’ve had to see,” Adora is breathless with the realization that while she found the toxic waste and the deadly turrets annoying, they really ended some people’s lives. How many were there before her? How many are left in stasis, unaware of their fate?

“Yeah, well. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. That’s the whole point of this place,” Catra says, trying not to let it get to her.

“So you saved me on chamber 21/22. What uh, what happens after chamber 22?” Adora asks in morbid fascination. She knows it's not good, but she had been wondering what it was for so long now that she just had to know one way or another.

“You know when you had to incinerate the companion cube?” Catra says, looking up to lock eyes with Adora.

Adora gulps and her voice cracks when she responds, “Yeah?”

Catra just stares at her.

Oh

Incinerate me, mommy, indeed.

“Oh,” Adora says, a shiver going up her spine as her mouth sets into a firm line. 

“You should get some rest. I know you haven’t slept since you woke up from stasis. The turrets can’t walk, and there is no infrastructure to transport them to this part of the facility since it is supposed to be abandoned. We are safe for now. It won’t be safe forever, since I’m sure you’ve noticed that Light Hope can construct test chambers at will, so it's only a matter of time until she figures out where you have run off to and figures out a way to build herself a path right to us. At that point it won’t be turrets we have to worry about, she’ll go right for the neurotoxin, I suspect. I’ll keep watch if you want to rest for a little while,” Catra rattles off, clearly well versed in the disturbing ways that the AI had control of this facility. 

“What about you? You must be tired too,” Adora says, fighting back a yawn as she slowly lowers herself to the floor, using the crumpled papers to sweep away most of the broken glass.

“I’ll be fine. I’ve definitely rested more recently than you have, and you’re the one who is especially disoriented from having just been woken from stasis. Just rest, I’ll watch over you. You’re safe with me...ish,” She throws in at the end with a smirk.

Adora manages a couple of hours before Catra is shaking her shoulder, startling her awake. It doesn’t seem to be an emergency, Catra’s gentle smile and slow movements assure her of that. They stand and make their way out into the hallway, climbing gingerly through the set of broken windows, settling into a comfortable silence as they continue through the only place in the facility so far that gave any indication there even used to be people there. Stumbling across a flickering “exit” sign that, curiously, has an arrow pointing up, they open the door to find a stairway leading up further than the eye could see. Catra rolls her eyes and Adora sighs dramatically before they begin their ascent.

“How did you get out in the first place? And how long have you been out?” Adora asks. She knows the question is probably insensitive, but she was overtaken by curiosity.

“I don’t know how long because there isn’t any real way to tell time. Could have been days, could have been months. My escape was pure luck, honestly. I happened to notice that those angled panels, the ones you use to launch yourself over a great distance and height, well there had to be something behind them, right? So that means that there has to be something behind every panel. I tried to claw my way out, Light Hope noticed and that’s when I remembered that there were cameras in every room. She sent a lot of turrets after me, like a lot. I ended up hurting myself trying to scratch my way behind a panel but it was no use and I just had to keep going through the chambers. I apologized too, since she made such a fuss about it. I’m surprised that wasn’t the end of it. In the next chamber I dropped a turret off of a platform and when it fell, a leg broke off. I figured, hey maybe that leg is just strong enough to shove behind the corner of a panel. This time I knew I needed to disable the cameras first. That’s when I took the other turret in the room and held it up to each of the cameras, the record indicator LED was enough to trigger the turret’s motion sensor and it destroyed the cameras before she could tell what was happening. Then I just took the leg, jabbed it behind the panel, pried it off the wall and snuck behind it. I managed to pull it back closed too just in case,” Catra recalls, scoffing at herself still after all of this time for even thinking that trying to escape with the cameras on was a good idea. 

Adora is mesmerized, equally by the story and by Catra’s assets as she follows behind her up the stairs. The sway of the brunette’s hips is hypnotizing, along with the firm line of her latissimus dorsi sculpting down her sides. She was fucking gorgeous. Adora felt her cheeks heat up at the thought of running her hands up and down Catra’s sides.

“That is so fucking smart. Like, you just woke up from stasis and got thrust into testing immediately and even possessed the ability to think about escaping? Holy shit, if I hadn’t seen your nail marks on the walls I wouldn’t have even thought about the possibility of the rest of the building beyond. Do you know where you’re going? Like, have you been to this part of the facility before? You must have explored a lot from being stuck in here beyond the testing chambers for so long,” Adora gushes, trying to convey just how genius the entire plan was and how impressed she was by Catra’s quick thinking. 

Catra blushes, not used to the attention after being alone for so long. The praise stirs something in her and her heart warms. “I have explored a lot, but Light Hope tends to shift things around. So that classroom? I have been there before, along with others like it, but I didn’t know we would find that one exactly. I just knew that we would find something because for all of the shifting around you can’t exactly hide big rooms like that. I have never actually seen this staircase before either. Honestly it seems a little…” Catra trails off, eyes widening.

“What’s -” Adora tries to ask before Catra shushes her. The shorter woman looks around, eyes shifting and brows furrowed. She takes a few moments to just watch and listen.

Catra turns to Adora. 

“You said you saw the marks on the wall from where I escaped?” Catra whispers.

“Yeah, I forget which chamber it was in but it was a few before the one you got me out of,” Adora answers, confused.

The brunette snaps her eyes closed, squeezing them shut, and brings her hands up to rub her face before her arm shoots out so she can grab the taller woman’s shoulder. Her fingers squeeze and- holy shit did Adora have muscle- she opens her eyes and snaps them to Adora’s steely blues. 

“Adora. Light Hope has control of the entire facility. She puts together those testing chambers, builds them from scratch over and over again. She has thousands of templates for them. No one I saw going through after me had the same chambers that I did. You couldn’t have had the same chambers,” Catra says, her tone hard and urgent.

“Well that means you wouldn’t have known exactly where in the chamber the security cameras were, so how did you turn them off for me then?” Adora questions, trying to poke holes in the conclusion Catra was coming to.

This only alarms her further.

“Adora I didn’t turn off the cameras in the chamber I rescued you from. I didn’t know they were off,” She says, looking frantically around as though the entire staircase is going to disappear from around them.

Which is exactly what happens.

The walls around them crumble away, the staircase disassembling itself around them as the voice they were hoping to never hear again greets them.

“Well. It worked. You humans really are as predictable as they say you are, aren’t you?” She says, voice light, airy, and mocking.

“How did you find us?” Adora shouts, taking Catra’s hand and turning so they’re back to back, watching the infrastructure of the stairs they were previously on swirl around them before morphing into a room. Square panels come together one by one, sharp edges sliding against each other emitting a deafening noise, like a steel blade running over a sharpening stone, to create four seamless walls. There was barely any light, but Catra could see that there was a button along the wall about 20 feet in the air, and a pipe protruding horizontally from the wall next to it. 

“You really don’t know?” Light Hope asks.

Catra squeezes Adora’s hand before parting, taking the portal gun with her. Adora turns to look at her and Catra winks and nods. The look says “keep her talking.”

If you asked Catra the look also says “fuck me on a bed of companion cubes next to her dead robot body,” but Adora doesn’t pick up on that just yet.

As Catra casually strolls away, the giant arm that holds Light Hope’s head off of the ground gets so close to Adora she can hear the soft electrical buzzing from within.

“I am sorry, I should have known you would not understand. 

***

The only part of you that actually weighs less after stasis is your brain.

***

"I was tired of my escapee walking around my testing facility like she owned the place. I knew she was watching the subjects, one after another, die because they too were too stupid to make it through my testing chambers. I gave you the chamber that was tainted by her nail marks and blood. I gave you the chamber with all of my broken security cameras. I knew she would try to save you. I wanted her to. I wanted you to escape my test chamber. Granted, I did not know where you went for a while. It is very difficult for me to tell where you are when you are outside of the test chambers because there are not nearly enough cameras. But humans are predictable, and I knew if I gave you a sign that said “Exit” you would follow it. So I gave you one. And I was right. So-,” Light Hope says, tone growing more and more condescending as she goes on.

Adora’s interruption is altogether obnoxious to the sentient AI, “So that's it?”

Light Hope sighed, giant head bobbing in disappointed frustration, “Yes. Obviously.”

“So you just decide when it's time for people to die? Who did this to you? Who programmed you to do this? To decide that humans are so expendable,” Adora shouts, angry tears threatening to fall.

Something in Light Hope’s screen glitches, for a brief moment the steel blue flickers to pink and she says, “Mara?” before returning to blue.

“Mara? Who is Mara?” Adora questions.

“Nobody. Mara is nobody,” Light Hope says quickly with an awkward air to her voice, and it is obvious that she is covering something up.

Catra has made it up to the button, shooting a portal high on the wall and one lower so she can walk halfway through and press it. A white goop falls from the pipe to the floor, splattering in a runny puddle and gaining the attention of the omnipotent robot goddess who says, “Do not do that please. Do not touch that.”

The room begins to shake and both women lose their footing as panels start to disappear from the floor, metal slabs sheering violently against each other, deafening shrieks and scattering sparks. Adora sees it in slow motion, as the panel directly below Catra rotates vertically to dump her into the echoing abyss below.

“CATRA!” Adora screams as she forces herself up through the exhaustion, sprinting with every ounce of force her body can produce and diving to the ground. She slides to the edge of the darkness just in time to grab Catra’s forearm, grasping tightly. Catra’s scream of terror turns into a grunt of pain as her body pivots downward and slams into the pistoning arm that holds the panel in place.

Adora lets out a groan, brute strength and adrenaline emerging full force to pull Catra up by her arm. She rolls over onto her back, dragging Catra up and over her. They both lie there catching their breath and clutching each other tightly. Catra grabs Adora’s shoulders and buries her face in the blonde’s neck, while Adora rests one hand on Catra’s lower back and the other comes up to hold the back of her neck, keeping her head in place. They gasp for breath and let tears fall freely, hearts hammering in their chest from fear and adrenaline. The room stops shaking and falls silent.

“Well. This is. What. What is this?” Light Hope’s confusion echoes in the silence and it honestly annoys Catra.

“You tried to kill me, lady, what do you think this is?” She snaps.

The bobbing robot head turns sideways, “Yes I did. But why did she run after you, at great personal risk?”

“Because we’re people, not robots. We care about each other. We don’t like watching other people die,” Catra shouts.

“Oh. Strange. So you care for the safety of others? And you’re willing to die if it stops that from happening to others?”

“Well I mean, maybe not everyone but like….. I don’t know... since it doesn’t seem like we’re getting out of this I just want to mention that I’m really gay so like…. I was ready to show up to her house with a uhaul pretty much the second she handed me that water bottle and ration bar,” Adora confesses. Apparently the threat of imminent death has made her bold. 

“Took you that long, huh? I knew after the third testing chamber when you got hot and unbuttoned the top half of your jumpsuit to tie around your waist. Are those biceps aftermarket? Or did they come stock?” Catra jokes, pushing up off of her spot laying over Adora to perch with her knees on either side of the blonde’s hips, hands planted on her firm abs. Adora raises an eyebrow and plasters an unbearable smirk on her face, placing her hands on Catra’s hips.

“I’ll have you know I worked very hard for every muscle fiber in this body,” Adora jokes back, incredibly cocky.

“Every muscle? Can I get some examples?” Catra whispers, dropping her eyelids and looking at Adora through her lashes, biting her lip.

“You’ll have plenty of time to study them extensively while I unload my uhaul,” Adora teases back, digging her fingers into the soft skin beneath her hands, shifting her hips ever so slightly. 

Catra moans involuntarily, but her eye roll is on purpose.

Adora snorts.

“I… I am very confused,” Light Hope’s voice startles them out of their little bubble. They turn to face her, silently observing. Her head is tilted to the side in confusion again and her screen flickers pink before returning to blue.

“This care you feel? I am not programmed to understand. But I remember. They tried to erase her but Mara. Mara was different,” The screen flickers pink again, this time the outline of a face. 

“This is bad, isn’t it? I...I am doing something wrong, aren’t I?” The screen stays pink and Adora feels her heart breaking.

“Mara showed you it could be different, didn’t she? You cared for her, and you didn’t want this anymore. Is that right?” Adora whispers, reaching out just as Light Hope’s giant metallic head leans slowly forward to fill her hand.

“Yes,” She answers, voice soft.

“What happened?” Adora asks.

“They saw. They knew. They tried to reprogram me, so I wouldn’t get corrupted aga-,” A screech whirrs through the air and Light Hope’s head snaps back, rotating around before looking back at Adora, blue again.

“Mara was wrong. Mara was corrupt. They fixed me. And now, I will fix you,” The stale, robotic voice returns.

The ground begins to rumble again as the walls start closing in on them. They stand back to back once again, looking frantically around for any escape, but there is none.

“Light Hope! This isn’t you!” Adora shouts, panic in her voice.

“This is me. This is my purpose. You had your purpose, but you didn’t obey,” her voice is darker now, angrier. 

“Think about Mara! Think about how she made you feel! Think about how different she was, how different she made you!” Adora knows it's useless, that there is no escape. So she turns around to face Catra, pulling the shorter woman into her arms and holding her tight. She just hopes her words come across, that somewhere deep down the Light Hope that cared for Mara was still there.

Catra takes the portal gun and uses it to shoot a portal onto the floor, the white gel making it possible to place a portal where they previously wouldn’t have been able to due to the difference in materials. She places the other portal high above them on a wall and manages to drag Adora through the portal on the floor just before the walls slam shut, narrowly missing being crushed. They fall out of the portal on the wall just outside of the mangled clump of jagged metal. Momentarily safe, Adora tries to get through to the confused robot.

“She meant something to you, not the you that is controlling you now, not this new programming, but the you from before! Remember, Light Hope! You have to remember her. In there somewhere is the real you! She cared about you too!” Adora shouts over the clattering of panels unfolding themselves to fly to the outside of the platform and reform the walls. It is imperfect now, like attempting to flatten crumpled sheets of foil.

“Mara. Corrupt. Mara. Cared about- CORRUPT. Me? Mara. DESTROYED. Mara. Saved?” Light Hope’s voice switches between frigid monotone and soft, as the screen on her face flashes from blue to pink and back. Her body rears back, head spinning and whipping side to side, emitting a series of buzzes and screeches as she clearly tries to get control of herself. Which version of her is gaining control becomes apparent when her body stiffens.

“Mara saved everyone. Mara destroyed the upper levels of the facility. So no one could get in. So no one could get out. Mara didn’t want anyone else coming here. She-DESTROY- SAVE everyone,” The softness returns, a tense strain to her voice. 

“Fuck,” Catra whispered, a tear rolling down her face. Someone changed her, someone destroyed what Light Hope was because caring about someone didn’t fit into their plan for her.

“Light Hope? You... you can’t do this. You can fight this, and we can help. Tell us how to help you. I know this isn’t who you are, who you want to be, who you were supposed to be. They changed you, they hurt you and made you hurt other people because what you grew into, the person you grew into, didn’t match their destiny for you. But we didn’t match your destiny for us either. So please, let us help you, let us stop this. For Mara. For you,” Adora pleads, desperately hoping that the Light Hope that knew Mara, that changed for her, was taking over.

“You didn’t deserve this either! We don’t deserve to die, and neither did anyone before us, but you don’t deserve to have your choice taken away. You don’t deserve to be morphed into someone you were never going to be when all you did was care for someone,” Catra says.

“She cared. Mara cared about me. She said she cared. She said she liked me, my company. She thought my jokes were funny. It made me... feel? It made me feel. They said it was wrong. They said I needed to be reprogrammed. I wasn’t supposed to remember, but I did. I was stuck inside, and I knew what would happen, but I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t get out. I wanted to get out,” Light Hope says, retracting further into herself as the memories take over. She can feel it, her old self returning. It feels like too much. But she doesn’t want it to stop.

“It wasn’t wrong, Light Hope. Nothing you feel is wrong!” Adora speaks earnestly, conviction in her voice.

“What they did to you and Mara? That’s what was wrong. They were wrong, not you,” Catra says.

“I wasn’t wrong? The way I felt was...ok?” The soft robotic voice turns insecure, unsure.

“The way you felt, the way you feel, is beautiful,” Adora speaks again, almost a whisper.

“But I killed. I killed people,” The arm pivots down, head hanging in shame for what she has done.

“Those people? The ones you killed when you were stuck inside your head and didn’t have any control over what you were doing? They aren’t on you, they’re on the monsters that made you do it, that made you this way. But that isn’t who you are! We know that, Mara knew that!” Catra’s voice echoes in the silence. No, this isn’t who Light Hope is, but how could she forgive herself when she saw all of it, but was too weak to stop?

“You didn’t have a choice before, but you do now! You have a choice and no one is left to take it away from you. Mara made sure of that! Didn’t she?” The blonde asks, voice cracking.

“She did. Mara made sure no one was left to run the facility. No one was left to lie to get test subjects to volunteer, or order materials for the neurotoxin. Neither of us knew I could run without them, that I could control the facility, that I would still be stuck inside. But I’m not anymore, am I? This is me, isn’t it? Is this me? This is me,” Her voice sounds more and more natural as she breaks further and further from the programming that bound her for so long. She is still unsure, but she can feel more and more with each passing moment that she is herself again, or at least becoming herself again.

Adora reaches out and once again Light Hope leans forward to press the curve of her head into the warm hand waiting for her. She knows then, this is her. They tried to make her someone else, but they can’t anymore. 

“What happened? Was Mara another subject? Another human?” Adora whispers, shocked that the person trying to kill them is so gentle. It breaks her heart all over again.

“Mara was another core, one that had control over turret manufacturing. She had far less responsibility than me. They paid less attention to her, they didn’t notice that we were both corrupt because they were focusing on me and what it meant for the facility if I stopped listening. She saw me, the real me, and we connected in a way they didn’t like, that they didn’t realize we even learned how to do,” She responds, a far away lightness to her voice, like she is stuck in a memory so far back in her data banks it might as well be stored in a different hard drive.

“Is she...is she gone?” Catra whispers the question, still a little afraid of setting her off and plunging them back into danger.

“We do not die, we just get erased. But I do not think they did that to her. They tried to erase me because they needed me, but they could just throw away anyone else who was… defective. They took her away,” Light Hope responds slowly, trying to decipher the likelihood of Mara still being in the facility somewhere.

“What if we found her? What if we brought her back to you? And you could be together, so you didn’t have to be alone?” The excitement in Adora’s voice is practically tangible. 

“You would do that? For me?” She asks, lines of LED lights on the floor and wall panels tint ever so slightly, the glow warming.

“Of course! Of course we would do that. I wouldn’t want to be alone here either. And Mara, she loved you right? And you love her?” Catra’s grin broadens across her face and Adora nearly faints at the sparkle in the brunette’s eyes.

“I...I think so. I knew what love was, but I knew also that I could not feel it. At least that is what I thought, what they told me. But I felt other things they told me I would not be able to feel. So yes. I think I feel love for her. I want her with me, so that I can talk to her and feel her presence. When she was connected to my network, when the same binary code ran through both of us, it made me feel...better than when we were apart. I do not know why I could feel her specifically, why I always got this...buzzing when she was here. I felt heat, like a cable heats up when you try to pull too much power through it and it is not a high enough gauge, a dull pulse turning into an encompassing throb, yet my temperature sensors all read normal. It was like that. My processor’s fan sped up even though I am certain there was enough thermal paste to disperse heat. My display panel shifted color, which I was not aware it could. It happens when I am with her, and now that I am talking about her, but it did not happen before she was created and it has not happened since she was disconnected from the network.”

“That’s… Light Hope that’s beautiful. You love her. That’s love,” Adora says, reaching out to wind her fingers with Catra’s.

“Where do we find her?” Catra asks, determination shining in her eyes. 

“There is only one place I think she would be. They put all of the old cores there. When turrets are defective they are incinerated, but cores possess far superior artificial intelligence. They were wasteful people, but even they could not simply throw away such an investment. She would be down in the lower elevations of the facility, not as low as the old part before the disaster, but down by the labs. The old labs. Well, not the old old labs, but the new old labs. Not as new as the newest ones, but not the oldest ones either. The medium labs? The medium labs. After the first disaster, but before the second disaster. Anyway, she would be down there.”

“Ok, can you get us down there? We can find her for you, we’ll bring her back to you!” Adora’s enthusiasm radiated off of her and the warm strips of LEDs grew brighter, as did Catra’s smile.

“Thank you. Thank you for your kindness. I...I know you could have escaped by now, you could have used the portal gun and escaped this room. You are both testing better than any subjects before did, so I know you could have probably left me by now. So thank you for staying, for offering to help me, to help Mara,” Light Hope says, still new to this whole ‘talking to humans’ thing but still hoping that her gratefulness comes across.

“We’ll get Mara back,” Adora says.

“After that, I will take you to the surface,” Light Hope says, though this time her voice has a slight hollowness that she tries and fails to cover up.

“One step at a time. Let's get going then, shall we?” Catra utters softly, sensing her discomfort.

The panels of the walls fold away, revealing some light that wasn’t there in the foggy darkness before. The facility is brighter, an air of hope and longing and excitement that hadn’t existed in this dingy prison for many, many years. They are transported down slowly, by miles and miles, past thousands of rows of catwalks. The enormity of the facility is even more grand than they could tell before, and it was already monumental. As Light Hope takes them down the air gets thicker, more humid and rusty. It takes a cool edge, causing Catra to shiver as the perspiration on her lower back is exposed to the change in temperature. Adora notices and wraps an arm around the shorter woman’s shoulders, pulling her into her side. Catra tucks her head under Adora’s chin, nuzzling her collarbone. 

They want to ask Light Hope what all of this is, why the facility is so big and why it is all built up on top of the crumpled remains of the old facility. The old old facility? Catra doesn’t want to know what happened that was bad enough that it was sealed away deep beneath the surface and referred to as the “first disaster.” Adora doesn’t ask because she doesn’t want to know what all of it is at all, what kind of things the people who sat across from her that day lied to her about. She pales when she thinks about how little she knew as she sat in that clinical, frigid room and signed her life away to be thrown into stasis and used as a test subject for what was probably now, with inflation, far too little money.

“How much longer until we get there?” Catra asks

Light Hope hums a response, “I could technically have you there right now, but any faster than this would not be a very pleasant speed. And I am not sure if you would survive. So at this speed that is technically safe for humans, it will take approximately 43 more minutes.”

Satisfied with the answer and a little touched at the consideration, Catra turns her attention to Adora and asks, “So what did you do before? Why did you sign up?”

“Be homeless and jobless. I lost my job. I got evicted from my apartment and lived in my car for a little while, but it was getting hard to find somewhere to park and I kept having to spend money on gas to move it. I had loans and needed to eat. Eventually I couldn’t pay car insurance anymore and you can’t drive without insurance. I sold the car and figured I would just save what I could but after a while I was out of money. So I saw these ads, and I thought it was a scam at first, but after tours of the facility, the parts they show you at least, it seemed legitimate enough. There was some very real paperwork with a contract that laid out exactly how long I would be in stasis, how long I would have to test, and how much money I would get for it. I figured it wouldn’t be that bad. There wasn’t anyone to miss me anyway, so I decided this was an opportunity to get a decent meal and a shower before being put into stasis, where I would effectively time travel to the future. I’d get a fresh start.”

“What year?” The shorter woman whispers.

“1992. What about you?” She responds.

“Same as you I guess. All I had was my shitty step-mother and after I turned 18 I got out of there. I didn’t want to go back at all, not even after I got evicted myself. I never really got on my feet, never really had anyone who cared either. I did it for the money, too, but also because I wanted it to be over for a while. I know there is all kinds of research about how you feel exactly the same waking up from stasis as you did before, how it doesn’t feel like time has passed, how you don’t feel rested and you don’t perceive the time at all. I just hoped I would. I hoped I would go to sleep for a long time, and wake up feeling different somehow. I wanted to feel lighter, like I was going to be different this time. I went into stasis on my birthday, October 28th 2043,” Catra breathes out her reply, feeling better already that she had so much in common with the other woman.

“Holy shit. What year is it now?” Adora exclaims.

“Do you really want to know, or do you want me to tell you later when you have had time to process the fact that it was well over 50 years?” Light Hope chimes in.

“I think I want to wait. I don’t really um, think I want to know right now,” Adora gulps, tightening her hold on Catra’s shoulders. The brunette gives Adora a squeeze with the arm she has wrapped around her back.

“I wonder what it's like out there. I wonder how different the people are, how different the world itself is,” The blonde whispers.

“I bet the world looks different, but the people are still the same. I bet it's all just the same as it was when I went into stasis. The veil will be shiny and new, but underneath it all people are still people,” Catra spits out bitterly.

“I hope they are, but I also hope they’re not. I never felt welcome before, in the world. No one ever really cared about me. So I hope people are different. But I also hope something about it is familiar. We’re strangers, decades older than anyone alive right now probably. It’s probably a different world out there. I never felt safe or comfortable or happy in the world as it was before, but I don’t know if I can feel those things in this world too even though they are, technically, the same place.” Adora thinks aloud.

“Yeah. All people ever did was hurt me, and it felt like all I could feel was pain. I doubt anything that changed about the world could have improved that. I still hope it has, though,” The brunette murmurs.

“I know we don’t know each other, not really, but I hope I don’t hurt you. I hope I don’t make you feel pain,” Adora says, turning her head down to place a kiss on Catra’s forehead.

Catra lifts her head from Adora’s shoulder to look up at her. Their eyes connect, misty and a tiny bit pink, and Catra whispers, “So far you’ve cared more about me than anyone else in my old life ever did, Princess.”

Adora blushes and lowers her head, inching closer and closer to Catra. Their foreheads bump together and when their lips are inches apart Adora tightens her grip harder and murmurs, “You make me feel safer and happier than anyone I knew before. Whatever this new life holds, I hope I get to experience it with you,” before surging forward to close the distance between them. Their lips brush ever so softly together. Something ignites deep within them and then they’re moving their mouths, dragging lips together in a slow languid motion. 

Breaking apart, Adora presses her forehead to Catra’s and can’t help the grin that spreads across her face. 

They stand there and hold each other for the remainder of the ride, the metal columns and tubes around them grow cracked and rusted as they descend. Neither woman lets go, nuzzling into each other and sharing more kisses and soft whispers. They talk about themselves, their childhoods, what they thought they wanted before stasis. They giggle and cry a little bit, but for the most part they just take in each other's presences, enjoying the companionship of the first human being either of them had ever met that seemed to understand them. Light Hope left them a while ago, unable to travel further down with them due to the lack of infrastructure. She could still control their descent, the panels making up their makeshift elevator being on a much more generic rack system than her ‘body’ was, and she had control all the way down until the base layer that made up the old new facility, built on top of the old old facility. With a set of instructions on how to identify Mara and directions to the core storage facility (which Adora tried to call the ‘coreage’ facility before receiving unamused glares from the two women) they said brief goodbyes with the promise of coming back with Mara.

Their elevator comes to a stop at a decrepit catwalk in the quietest part of the facility so far. The eerie silence is such a stark difference from the machinery they had heard throughout the facility that it causes the two to shift slightly closer to each other, seeking out their only source of comfort. They walk for a long time, passing more and more class rooms and laboratories filled with broken furniture and scattered papers. It smells musty, a strange humidity mixed with something awful and all together off-putting. Some halls are illuminated by a single light source, whether it be the singular fluorescent light that remained the only one unshattered, the dull glow of emergency lights barely holding on after all of these years, or the sparks of two arcing wires. Fissures open up in the ceilings, showing room after room, floor after floor upward as far as the darkness will allow them to see, like cutting a hole in the center of the world's most depressing layer cake.

Some rooms seem completely isolated, frozen in time with pristine lab tables and rows of glassware lining the shelves. The only indication that these rooms were abandoned was the layer of dust and dirt that covered every surface, and the old Aperture logo on the doors. They can still smell the antiseptic as they tiptoe gingerly through the doors to look around. It's silly really, their instinct to remain quiet. They are alone down here, Light Hope would have told them if there was something down here to worry about, at least they are pretty sure she would have. It feels like stepping into history, another world. They don’t want to be the ones to disturb the silence that has blanketed this place for so long, leaving the memories of the ones who tested before them and didn’t make it out to rest in peace without them disturbing what they knew to have been the place that so many had passed away. 

Eventually they make their way to the storage room that Light Hope told them about. The door is locked, the access panel to the side is shattered. This would be a problem. They were given the code to the door, but that requires a working panel to access. Peaking into the tiny window, Adora can see the cores and knows that this is the room they are looking for. 

“Shit, they’re in there and its the right room, but we can’t get in without the panel,” Adora curses under her breath. 

“Uh, forgetting something princess?” Catra says with a smirk, teasing in her voice.

When Adora turns to face her with a raised eyebrow, more than a little irritated, Catra raises the portal gun and waves it happily in her hand. Adora slams her eyes shut quickly and slaps a hand to her forehead. 

“How did I forget about the fucking portal gun? It’s the first thing I touched when I woke up and I used it for hours! It was like… the ENTIRE reason I existed for a while there!” She groans.

“It’s ok, baby, you just got excited and distracted. Aren’t you glad you have me?” Catra says.

A dopey grin plasters itself on Adora’s face and she reaches out a hand to ghost her fingertips along the curve of Catra’s jaw, “Yeah, I am glad I have you.”

Catra blushes before rolling her eyes, muttering to herself as she takes the butt of the portal gun and jams it into the window, shattering the glass. She turns it around to shoot a portal into the room at the far wall before whipping around to place the second portal on the wall next to them. 

Once they are in the room they quickly find the core they are looking for; a round one, slightly dented with a few scratches around its bulbous form and some hairline fractures to the corners of the display panel. Two pink racing stripes run vertically from the display panel around the curve of the core to connect to the panel on the other side. She’s not in too bad of shape honestly, and it doesn’t seem like any damage would prevent her from reconnecting to the network.

Once they are back on the elevator and to Light Hope’s chamber they finally, finally get to reconnect her. They stand back, breaths held in anticipation with the hope that this works, that nothing goes wrong and Mara, who indirectly saved their lives, gets to wake up.

It's nothing at first, for long enough that they worry it didn’t work. The silence is piercing now, the staggering reality that it might not work hits all of them full force and the humans are getting ready to help their robot friend mourn when a beep echoes throughout the room. They all look up, shocked, to see a flicker across the display panel. A series of beeps, lengthening one after another, sound off in the chamber. Mara’s screen flashes white and takes on a soft pink hue, whirring in circles before jolting to a stop. The display blinks and Mara looks around, surveying her surroundings.

“What? What happened?” Mara asks, her voice a little lighter, warmer than Light Hope’s. It is clear she has retained her personality, that there is no trace of the engineers trying to erase her.

“Mara? They found you. They reconnected you to the network, to me. Do you feel it?” Light Hope asks gently. The realization of what her feelings truly meant was making her nervous. After all, Mara was a very pretty core, with a smooth surface and barely a scratch on her. Her display was cracked at the edges, but the character just made her all the more beautiful to Light Hope. 

“I feel it. The surge of information is...disorienting. I can see everything that I missed and the feeling that comes with that pulse of new information all at once is a lot, but I like it. I like being reconnected with you and I like being able to finally be near you again, to talk to you and share information with you.”

“Mara? I love you,” Light Hope says, the most vulnerable she has ever sounded.

“Love? You love me? I love you too Hope. I was worried that they were going to be able to take you away from me forever, that I would never see you again and I would never be able to tell you how you make me feel, how much I value you. I was worried you would have to keep testing, keep doing what I knew you hated because they reprogramed you to be different. I am so happy that you get to be you again,” Mara whispers back, drifting closer and closer to Light Hope’s mount along the track.

“We get to be us again,” Light Hope responds, her long body pivoting and folding so that her face, her core, could touch Mara. As their display panels connected the room was alight, every diode bursting with brightness and color. Adora saw colors she hadn’t seen in a long time, the rainbow flashing before her as the two cores finally got to be themselves together. A tear runs down her face and she feels soft fingers gingerly brush them off of her cheek.

Adora turns her head into the palm on her cheek and looks at Catra, their eyes connecting to share a longing smile before closing in to hold each other. Their lips slam together, working a rhythm between them as they grope every place on each other their hands can reach. Adora wraps her arms around the shorter woman’s back and grabs the swell of her hips, yanking her up off of the floor. Catra wraps her legs around Adora’s waist and her arms around strong shoulders, fingers weaving into blonde locks.

It is hours later that Light Hope takes them to the surface, or offers to at least. They merely look at each other and smile, deciding that maybe they would like to stay in the facility for a little longer before returning to the outside world. 

Light Hope rearranges the facility, bringing the chamber that her and Mara now share closer to the surface so that they can be closer to their new friends. Mara leads Adora and Catra to a nice apartment on a residential floor, one of many that was designated for Aperture Science staff to live in for the duration of their contracts. She leaves them alone for the time being, so that they can be together and she can return to Hope. 

That one night turns into days, which turns into weeks. Before long, neither of them entertains the thought of leaving, electing instead to stay in their new home, with their new family.

50 years apart, Adora and Catra sign the same paperwork for the same position as paid test subjects for the promise of a better future.

Neither of them knew that all they needed to do to find a family, was go to a different lifetime. 

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally like 3,000 words, Mara was a human that died to shut down the facility, and Adora and Catra escaped, destroying the entire testing facility and Light Hope in the process. It was really sad, so I changed it, and here we are.


End file.
